As the nation cares nothing for its girlhood nor for
directing employment and education for the supreme business of
motherhood, upon which the national existence is always staked, vast
numbers of women in early adolescence are now exposed to the very
conditions of temptation outside the home to which so many of their
brothers have succumbed. The factory girl learns to drink, and when she
marries she takes her drinking habits with her into her home. Modern
industrialism, therefore, is to be cited as one of the causes for the
increase in drinking amongst women. It may be noted that, in Italy, the
temperate race which, according to one elegant but baseless theory, has
been evolved through ages of past drinking, is proving itself
intemperate when its members are exposed in towns to the industrial
conditions which look like national success and the continuance of which
would mean national ruin.
A third cause of this increase is to be found in the greatly enhanced
facility with which alcoholic drinks can now be obtained by women, not
merely outside the home, but within it. So far as Great Britain is
concerned we must trace disastrous consequences to the "heaven-born
finance" of a former illustrious Chancellor of the Exchequer, who made a
little money for the State by selling to grocers permission to sell
alcoholic liquors. That was a great blow at womanhood and especially
motherhood; not to mention its lamentable effect in raising the
death-rate amongst grocers in that intensely obvious and inevitable
manner, the increase of temptation, which nothing can persuade the
enemies of temperance reform to understand.
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